Photo by Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that the keeper is still around on this Memorial Day to get his usual note off to the two I & R platoon mates who are NOT around and haven’t been since the artillery shell took them out the day after their squad replaced the keeper’s on the Korean hilltop observation post.
“Dear Willie and Joe: Those aren’t your real names but that’s who you were to the rest of us—good buddies wisecracking at each other’s jokes, making fun of the Army, lamenting the sordid nature of combat and assuming you would both someday return to Michigan and put the pieces back together to lead full and loving lives.
“Well, ‘SONOVABITCH!’
“It was not to be, and we are all damn sorry about that.
“But we feel even more deeply our good fortune in the matter of squad rotation that had occurred up on the observation post.
“It’s been a wonderful life that you never got to enjoy, Willie and Joe, and the keeper thought about you this weekend at a family gathering along the Wisconsin River, replete with scurrying and splashing great grandchildren, boat rides, beach games, heaping plates of food and a casual aura of such love and togetherness as would melt old vets’ hearts.
“So, you were there in the keeper’s fleeting memory, Willie and Joe, and there can be no doubt you would much rather have been over in Michigan with your own riverside clans.
“’SONOVABITCH!’”
